I've been aware that many people play multiplayer games of Civ & variants, either "live" over a LAN or the Net, or via e-mail ("PBEM") or otherwise. However, I just read ( here on Kuro5hin ) about an idea that boggled and excited me all at the same time - "democratic Civilization".
In this case, it's Civilization 3 (the solo version), played by a large team of people acting as a democratic government, including a Constitution and elections and all that.
But there's more, the "Intersite Democracy Game" (ISDG) is playing multiplayer Civ 3, with different teams controlling each nation in the same democratic fashion.
It all sounds like a really neat idea, although if normal Civ is time-consuming, this version must be far more so (from the article, it has taken about 6 months to do 100 turns of ISDG so far).
Oh well, if you're a Civ fan and have nothing better to do for the next year or so, why not go join a game ? :-)